Motivation, Emotion, Learning Experience, and Second Language Comprehensibility Development in Classroom Settings: A Cross‐Sectional and Longitudinal Study

Abstract

This study presents a cross‐sectional and longitudinal analysis of how 108 high school students in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms enhanced the comprehensibility of their second language (L2) speech according to different motivation, emotion, and experience profiles. Students’ learning patterns were primarily associated with their emotional states (anxiety vs. enjoyment) and secondarily with their motivational dispositions (clear vision of ideal future selves). Students’ anxiety together with weaker Ideal L2 Self related negatively to their performance at the beginning of the project—performance that they had achieved after several years of EFL instruction. Students’ enjoyment together with greater Ideal L2 Self predicted the extent to which they practiced and developed their L2 speech within the 3‐month framework of the project. Results suggest that more frequent L2 use with positive emotions directly impacts acquisition, which may in turn lead to the lessening of negative emotions and better long‐term L2 comprehensibility. Open Practices This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. Study materials are publicly accessible in the IRIS digital repository at http://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

The Effect of Perception of Teacher Characteristics on Spanish EFL Learners’ Anxiety and Enjoyment

“…Such positively oriented students not only practice the FL often, but also make the most of every learning opportunity. Thus, even among a group of students under the same classroom conditions, those with greater FLE tend to demonstrate more substantial, robust, and sustainable progress in their FL proficiency in the long run (Saito et al., ).…”

“…The principal argument of positive psychologists is that general psychology has concentrated on the negative and not on the positive, and that it is important to boost positive emotions, cultivate greater engagement, and increase the appreciation of meaning in life and its activities (MacIntyre & Mercer, ). Positive Psychology supports a more holistic perspective on humans, which for SLA translates as shifting away from the exclusive focus on negative emotions, foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), and taking into equal consideration learners’ positive emotions, such as foreign language enjoyment (FLE) (Dewaele & Li, ; Dewaele & MacIntyre, ; Dewaele et al., ; Jiang & Dewaele, ; Saito et al., ). Research on emotions in SLA is blooming and booming, reflected in increasing numbers of special issues and edited books on the topic (Arnold, ; Berdal‐Masuy, ; Berdal–Masuy & Pairon, , ; Dewaele & Li, ).…”

Motivation and Second Foreign Language Proficiency: The Mediating Role of Foreign Language Enjoyment

“…Compared with negative emotions, such as foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), FLE is more likely to be triggered by teachers [23] and has a more significant influence on foreign language performance [22]. Moreover, some scholars have discussed the correlation between motivation and FLE in language acquisition, and pointed out that students' enjoyment, together with greater motivation, are related to better performance in L2 [54]. In addition to the positive influence of both instrumental and integrative motivations on second foreign language proficiency [18,48,49], we could further conjecture that FLE partially mediates the focal relationships of interest.…”

Developing and validating a methodology for crowdsourcing L2 speech ratings in Amazon Mechanical Turk

“…As crowdsourcing has become an increasingly recognized means of data collection (Eskénazi, Levow, Meng, Parent, & Suendermann, 2013), researchers have recruited AMT workers to evaluate mispronunciations in native (McAllister Byun, Halpin, & Szeredi, 2015) and L2 speech (Peabody, 2011;Wang, Qian, & Meng, 2013), and to rate samples for features such as accentedness (Kunath & Weinberger, 2010). In addition to providing access to a larger and possibly more representative sample of listeners across a range of languages, services like AMT may prove to be a necessary data collection tool for designs that generate a large number of samples, such as the longitudinal pronunciation studies that are becoming more common in L2 speech research (e.g., Derwing & Munro, 2013;Nagle, 2018b;Saito, Dewaele, Abe, & In'nami, 2018).…”